


unspeakable things

by shuofthewind



Series: The Making of Monsters [REMIXED] [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Psychics/Psionics, Alternate Universe - Raven Cycle, Bechdel Test Pass, Gen, I Don't Even Know, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Random & Short, Rare Pairings, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 10:14:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6901777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>There is another dying on the ley line when they should not. And so you live, when you ought not. Find me.</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>[Or, Darcy Lewis searches for the Raven Queen, and may possibly someday be killed with a kiss; the local gym is full of psychics; some people just dream up ravens; Karen is a kleptomaniac; and Kate breaks things with her brain. Whether or not the Raven Queen actually exists is inconsequential.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	unspeakable things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [broadwanime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/broadwanime/gifts).



> I have no idea where the fuck this came from, but I'm blaming Twin for it. Twin, this is me blaming you. You are Tony Stank.
> 
> This is also an utter bastardization of The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater, and I don't even care anymore since no one will read it, probably. 
> 
> Again, Tony Stank, I hate you. I was supposed to write TSoD tonight. How could you mention this and get this idea in my head.
> 
> Content warnings: some gore, some weird dream shit, some blood, a mention of suicide, blood mentions, death mentions, etc. Unbeta'd. I haven't read _The Raven Boys_ in forever, so forgive weird differences. More than half of htem were intentional, but there are probably more than a few that aren't.

Darcy Lewis was fanciful the way corset knives were fanciful: pretty, and slightly absurd, until they cut you and you realized they were just as sharp as any other blade. She spent a little more time than she had to with the absurdity, because it fit her well and it made things easier at Aglionby, but she split skin just the same when she wanted, short and bright and dangerous. She wore the uniform as well as any other Raven Girl, plaid with creases like papercuts, and she kept her head down and left the smile to go a bit stale on her mouth, because it made things easier than baring her teeth did.

The other girls at Aglionby gave her a wide berth. She was The Scholarship—not a scholarship student, just The Scholarship—and that meant going home to the student dorms and creasing her uniform back up and waiting until midnight before slipping out to follow the ley line again. She needed summer jobs, she needed balance books, she needed to keep every receipt and measure every step and every night she needed to wander the hills and dowse with sticks she found in shrubbery, and that meant she was The Scholarship and not a girl and the other students felt free to ignore her. There was a certain lonesome luxury in being ignored, and it meant nobody bothered you.

Well, not nobody.

“You’ve tried this way.” Kate hooked her hair back out of her face, which seemed silly for a ghost to do, but then again, Kate did quite a number of silly things for being a ghost. She fussed over the bloodstains on her skirt, and always buttoned up her uniform jacket to hide where the knife went in. “Nothing was here.”

“If it’s anywhere,” Darcy said, reasonably, “it should be in the woods.”

“Yeah, but not this part of the woods, dipshit. We’ve been this way before.”

Kate did not like going into the woods. Kate did not like being seen. Kate did like talking, quite a bit, but it was irritating sometimes for Kate to like talking so much. Darcy was the only one who could hear her. She’d given up wondering if Kate was actually a ghost, or an apparition, or a hallucination. Kate, simply, was Kate, and Kate existed either in Darcy’s head or at Darcy’s side. Jane was pretty certain, thanks to all her electric doodads, that Kate _did_ exist, because things tended to fly a lot when Kate was around. Things that were not intended to fly. Such as corkscrews. And blackboards. Of course, Jane hadn't been able to prove it before going back to London, her therapy dog at her side, and so Darcy existed on a plane that other people could not. There was the plane with Kate, and the plane without. It was like stepping sideways through a bad hedge and finding a graveyard on the far side.

“Fine,” Darcy said. “We’ll walk along the road instead.”

Darcy didn’t drive, which meant the road from the Aglionby dorms (a good two miles down the road from Aglionby Academy, and unused aside from Darcy and a girl named Helen Cho) was a long and winding and terrible walk to make at eleven o’clock on a Friday night. A few cars whipped past her as she went, holding her rod in one hand like someone might hold a dog’s leash, waiting for a twitch. A number of roads in Helskich (nobody called it Helskich, it was only ever Hell’s Kitchen, to the people who lived here, and there was a certain poetry in that—who baked in the Kitchen, who braised ribs in it, what emerged from that godawful oven anyway) followed the ley line, and the road away from Aglionby was one of them, which meant the dowsing rod twitched a little as she went. Kate trod along next to her, jostling plants just like any living person, snapping twigs and making a game of stepping on dry leaves. There was a childishness to Kate that didn’t match her age. Seventeen when she’d died, a senior, ready to fly, until someone decided to drop a knife in her stomach on the ley line just as Darcy—nine, and gasping, and lying beside a crumpled wreck of a car—had let her final heartbeat slip away from between her ribs.

“Incoming,” said Kate, about two miles out of the Kitchen. Darcy pressed her dowsing rod to her thigh, and kept walking, kept her head down. The night air tasted like secrets. A car was slowing down, behind her, the way cars always slowed down when men drove them past girls walking alone at night. The window rolled down.

“You lost?”

He had an Aglionby voice, not a Hell’s Kitchen voice. Not that Aglionby accepted boys, it was a girl’s only school, but it was that low sweet roll of money splayed on a counter-top, not her awful trailer twang. “No, sir,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I’m fine, thank you.”

“You want a ride, Miss I’m Fine, Thank You?” he said, and in the backseat one of his friends laughed and clapped palms with another. There was a girl back there too, and she felt vaguely betrayed that one of her own was sitting and watching without a word. “Because you _are_ fine, thank you for asking.”

“Bastard,” Kate said, in a voice like a bear trap. “We could pop his tires.”

“We could,” Darcy replied, not bothering to lower her voice. “But I’m not the one who could manage that.”

“What the fuck?”

“Nothing.”

“Everything,” Kate spat. “I kind of want to pop his tires.”

“Don’t pop the tires,” Darcy said, and went back to her dowsing. “It’s such a pretty car.”

“The fuck is wrong with you,” said Aglionby Voice. The music in the car dimmed and dimmed. “You talking to me?”

“No,” said Darcy.

“No,” said Kate. “Fucker.”

“Let me out,” said another voice. It was the girl. Aglionby Voice blinked, and swiveled in his seat.

“’lektra—”

“Let me out,” said the voice again, and Darcy knew that voice. That voice was in a few of her classes. Clipped and classy and very French with a roll of something else beneath. Nobody disobeyed that voice. The car door popped open and vomited, and then Elektra Natchios was standing on gravel in her expensive military boots, patting the top of the vehicle. “Be on your way.”

“What the fuck,” said Aglionby Voice again.

“You heard me.”

They stared at each other. Aglionby Voice tsked, and gunned the engine. Darcy still wasn’t quite sure what was happening, but apparently whatever it was left her with Elektra Natchios on the side of the road in the middle of the night, and nobody was finding it odd.

“Tell me,” Elektra said. “What is The Scholarship doing alone by the highway with a stick?”

“I’m hunting gnomes,” Darcy said, and started walking again. There was a crack like a firing gun, and then Elektra had caught up with her. She was in the shortest skirt Darcy had ever seen, complete with fishnet, and the strap of her tank top slipped off her shoulder the way a wolf’s tongue lolled out its mouth.

“Gnomes don’t exist.”

“They do you if you wish hard enough.”

“What else comes?” Elektra tipped her head. .”When you wish hard enough.”

She’d think it mockery, if Elektra had said anything other than _when_. _When_ you wish hard enough, not if, and Darcy’s in the business of wishing. Her whole life has been wishes, lost, one after another after another. “Dead queens,” she said. “Corpse roads. Ghosts and will o’ the wisps. Meeting strangers in the dark.”

There was that gunshot crack again, and Darcy realized suddenly it was Elektra laughing. “What a strange little thing you are.”

“Better strange than ordinary,” she said, and went back to work with her dowsing rod. Kate was humming in the way that made the air buzz, though nobody ever noticed. “Better strangeness than hypocrisy.”

Elektra hummed back at Kate without realizing it, echoing the tone, the thrill, the thunderclap roll of it. “I see.”

She traipsed after Darcy for half a mile, hands behind her head.

“Is she going to go?” Kate whispered. “What is she doing?”

“Who knows,” Darcy said out of the corner of her mouth.

“What dead queen?” Elektra said, and they both jumped. It was odd, watching ghosts jump. It was like watching a sock be inverted, person-style. “America has no dead queens. Or queens. Unless you count Dr. Grey in the biology department.”

Darcy, who liked Dr. Grey, made a face. “Her name,” she said in her teacher’s voice, “is Aldrif Odinsdottir. She razed cities to the ground in ancient Norway, and her consort was a woman, and she can grant a wish to whoever finds her tomb. She’s the Raven Queen.”

Elektra had a look on her face that made Darcy think of a cat, playing with a mouse before choosing whether or not to crush its skull. “The Raven Queen?”

“Her tomb is here on the ley line somewhere.” Darcy went back to dowsing. Elektra trotted to keep up. “If you find her, supposedly, she grants one wish.”

“To everyone who finds her or just the leader?”

“I don’t know. That’s part of what I want to find out.”

Elektra followed for a while longer.

“Her consort was a woman?”

“Sera,” Darcy said. “Aldrif and Sera. People called her the Raven Queen, or the Queen of Hel, and her consort was her Red Right Hand.”

“You’re crazy,” Elektra told her.

“A little. But there’s evidence.” She had a notebook in her pocket to prove it. “I’m going to find her, someday. She’s in Hell's Kitchen somewhere, or around it. She has to be. I’ve spoken to scientists all over the world and they all insist she has to be here.”

“Hm.” Moonlight played over the bones of Elektra’s face. “Why do you care?”

 _You live for the Raven Queen,_ the voice had said. _Find me._

“She asked me to,” Darcy said.

It should, with any reasonable person, been enough to send them screaming for the hills. Elektra Natchios was not a reasonable person. Elektra Natchios was a murder waiting for a weapon, and Elektra Natchios was bored, and Elektra Natchios shifted desks the next morning when school started to settle at Darcy’s left, like a bodyguard at the side of a queen.

.

.

.

He’d learned four things from his grandmother before she died.

The first was tarot. Matt wasn’t particularly good at it. After the accident, he couldn’t actually read cards anymore, though he could pick them out and set them in an array the same as anyone else. (The secret: he could still read the cards, he just pretended otherwise, because tracing his fingers over the hand-painted deck meant he could sketch out every word of every card, could tell the difference between the Moon and the Hermit and the Tower and the Five of Cups just by fingering the edges of the worn paper. But he did not ever say this.) He learned tarot, and his grandmother pronounced him decent, aside from his tendency to use his left hand. “Devil’s hand,” she’d say, and spit. “Mixes the moods of the cards.”

“I don’t think this deck minds,” Matt would say, and she’d clip him around the ear and have him do another reading.

The second thing he learned was the curse. “All Murdock men are cursed,” she said when he was four, and cutting into an apple with a tooth that was almost coming out. It clung to his gum by a virtual thread. “But your curse is worse than any I’ve seen.”

“Dad’s not cursed.”

“Your father’s cursed to love only once.” Gran sucked her teeth. She had one falling out, too, but that was from age and not from growth. She bitched more about it, too. “You’re cursed to kill with that mouth of yours, child. True love’s kiss winds with your lady love dead.”

He would have had nightmares if she hadn’t told him the year before that _Murdock boys got the Devil in ‘em,_ told him in the midst of a reading with a voice that was not her own, raw and terrible, and her hands crooked into claws. He would have had nightmares, if it did not seem natural, that a boy with the Devil inside him would kill his true love. Of course that was how things worked.

When she died, he learned the third thing, which was that everyone died, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. His father (his father was psychic too, like his grandmother, but in a different kind of way, psychometric, touching things and gathering memories out of them the way a spider gathers flies) touched the back of his shoulder and said, “Your gran said a lot of things, Matty. Doesn’t mean all of ‘em were true.”

Matt watched the earth dumped on the grave in the poor churchyard of St. Patrick’s, and wondered. “I do kill my true love, though.”

Jack was silent for so long that Matt thought he’d said the wrong thing. He sighed. “That bit’s unavoidable, I’m afraid.”

And that was that.

Matt was sensible the way knives were, multipurpose, good for building and for tearing apart. He built himself around that notion, that true love’s kiss would kill, and he did not kiss at all. It was easier after the chemical accident, because no one who would pity the blind boy enough to kiss him would possibly be his true love, and thus that meant she, whoever she was, was safe.

The fourth thing, really, was his senses. _Batteries power themselves as much as any other thing,_ his grandmother had said, and yes, Matt was a battery—Matt could leave a hand on Jack, or Foggy, or Emma, and have them suddenly rolling in psychic power—but when the accident happened and his vision went black, he turned part of it inward. He could never manipulate the world, but he could power himself, and in powering himself he could see the universe again, in its own bloody way. He told no one this outside of the gym, outside of his father and Foggy and Emma, and he doubted Emma remembered. Emma Frost did not tend to remember things about the Murdocks. That was past and present, not future, and Emma spent a great deal of time wandering in the might bes and the will bes and the great wobbly ball of possibility that most people thought was a straight line. The morning he turned eighteen, she woke him up and said, “You’ll meet her this year,” the way someone else might mention a stain on your shirt.

Matt sat up in bed, and remembered his grandmother. “I don’t care.”

(Another secret: he did care, very much. True love is only a thing that happens once.)

.

.

.

In sophomore year Karen was folded into the arms of Monmouth Manufacturing the way a bat was folded into a cave, a crackle of wings and gleaming eyes and fur.

The Scholarship—“Darcy,” Elektra Natchios said with bared teeth, and Elektra Natchios was the kind of person that other people whispered about, a wild dog that had finally chosen a master—used to live on-campus, the way Helen Cho did, but suddenly at the start of sophomore year she vanished from the building. Karen knew this because Karen worked in the administrative office as part of a series of ongoing detentions. An in-school suspension, really. It took a week of the teachers trying to track Darcy Lewis down before Elektra Natchios whirled in with her, all slinky cat to Darcy’s mousy professorial bemusement, and said, “She’s living with me.”

“Same address?” said Pepper Potts, the principal’s administrative assistant.

“Actually,” said Elektra, and threw a paper airplane onto Pepper’s desk, “there’s the change-of-address form.”

Judging from the look on Pepper’s face, it was the first time Elektra had ever submitted anything ever in her time at Aglionby. Judging from what Karen remembered of Elektra in class, it quite possibly could have been the first time Elektra had turned in anything _ever._ Which meant that the change of address forms were approved, and Darcy Lewis moved into Monmouth Manufacturing.

Karen watched from a distance. She didn’t drive by Monmouth, or anything, that was silly. She watched Elektra and Darcy Lewis, trying to figure it out. They weren’t together, though the whole school had theories about Elektra Natchios. They put their heads together and sat together in class and laughed quietly at things other people did not know, but it wasn’t that they were together. It was as if Elektra the blade had found a hand to fit her hilt. It was as if Darcy Lewis had found a puzzle that did not want to be solved, truly, and had decided to carry it along anyway because it was interesting. It was any number of things. Karen was transfixed by it, because The Scholarship and The Basket Case had become Them, and Karen was always transfixed by things with capital letters attached.

(Arguably, Darcy may also have been a Basket Case. Karen caught her talking to the air not once or twice but six different times, and laughing like the air had said something funny back. Still, Basket Case remained, as it always did, capitalized in Karen’s head.)

Karen was capitalized, too. Karen was The Disappointment. She was, she thought, the staple in someone’s shoe that pricked and pricked and could never be found. She was the eyes in the back of the room, watching and waiting. She was the After Keven Afterthought, and that was as transfixing as it was devastating. Her world was punctuated with the screech of tires on asphalt.

One day in April, the chair in front of hers screeched and whirled, and Karen looked up from her book ( _Nicholas Nickelby,_ not for Professor LeBeau but because she wanted to) to find Elektra Natchios straddling it, and looking at her. It was a very, very weighty thing, to be looked at by a knife.

“What,” Karen said.

“You’re stalking us,” Elektra said. “Stop it.”

“I’m not stalking you.”

She’d seen them in the woods, the other day. Walking. Darcy had been carrying a stick like a wand, weaving it back and forth across the ground. Elektra had followed her, sharp heels in the deep earth. Karen had watched for a moment, and kept on jogging.

“You are,” Elektra said. “You pretend not to but you are. You watch us.” Her curse of a mouth curled up. “Hungry for adventure?”

“No,” Karen said, but her heart jumped.

“You’re a little crow,” Elektra said. “Not a raven, really. You pick up shiny things and keep them even when they don’t belong to you. You’re a thief.”

“I’m not.”

“Every good queen needs a thief for her court.” Elektra slung herself off the chair. “Come meet the queen.”

(She did not remember moving into Monmouth. She just sort of wound up there, and her parents never really remembered to call to see where she was. Karen tended to find herself places without realizing it, and not leave them again, the worst sort of scab. Still, she couldn’t seem to stop herself from doing it.)

.

.

.

Kate had very little to say, when Darcy wasn't around. She was stronger or weaker depending on Darcy's mood, brighter or duller depending on the day. The life that Darcy had stolen (or borrowed, or amended, or snitched) was dragging Kate along like a kite, buffeting her in the wind of Aglionby. She'd tried in the first few weeks to wander away, but it was as if the ley line and the blood had knitted something in Kate's soul to something in Darcy's, even though one of them was still technically breathing. 

Sometimes Elektra would throw her out windows, because they could, and because it didn't hurt. Kate bounced, now. She bounced the way a wizard might bounce, and laughed, and felt human again for a bare moment. 

The gaping hole in her ribs was always there, and it seemed to eat her alive when everyone slept. She didn't know how to say this, though. She had very little to say when Darcy wasn't there, and it was a trend that continued for a long, long time. 

(Matt made it easier, but that came later.)

.

.

.

It was Elektra who mentioned them first.

“The Murdocks,” she said. She was practicing gymnastics, and she could feel Karen Page watching her, stolen glances that rebounded and reflected like a prism. She did not ask Karen to stop. Darcy was paging through her journal, not raising her head, even as she murmured to Kate about this calculation or that legend or that old thread of a tale of a rumor of a whisper about the good queen Aldrif. Whether or not anyone else believed Aldrif existed was irrelevant, Elektra thought. Darcy believed in her, and Darcy was interesting in a way that no one else in this damn town could ever be, and that meant Elektra would follow even if the legends of Aldrif and Sera, the Raven Queen and her Red Right Hand, wound up being nothing more than the wet dream of an ancient Viking lesbian.

“The who?” Karen Page said. Karen Page had not grown up near Helskich. Neither had Elektra, but Elektra made it her business to know the landscape of anywhere she went. It was the only way to dream properly, or that was what Stick said. In her basket under the punching bag, Sai made an ugly croaking sound that meant she needed feeding. The baby raven was an awful fletching thing, barely the length of Elektra’s palm, and common sense said she ought to pitch it out, but it was a baby and it was hungry, and there was an honesty in that which she appreciated. Elektra snapped up off the floor, and went to find the formula.

“The Murdocks,” Darcy said, still not looking up from her book. “There’s a boxing gym on Forest Avenue. That’s them. The grandmother was a psychic, but she died. I don’t know if they do readings anymore.”

Karen chewed at her thumbnail. “They’re probably fake.”

“They’re not,” Darcy said absently. “They told my mother when her boyfriend would kill himself.”

This was a particularly revolting piece of news, and Elektra delighted in it. “When?”

“Five years ago.”

Kate kind of solidified next to Darcy. The longer one spent time with Darcy, the more solid Kate became, though there was always a funny faded quality to her, the way photographs would get murky around the edges when you exposed them for too long. “How?”

“Slit wrists.”

“That’s vile,” Kate said, beaming. “Did you hate him?”

Darcy lifted her eyes from her book, finally. “You,” she said, “are a gruesome, bloodthirsty child of Hannibal Lecter. I don’t know why I talk to you.”

“You can’t get rid of me,” Kate said, and vanished again. Or faded. Or inverted. Or whatever it was she did when she wasn’t visible. She was quite proud of the fact that she could do it, Kate, even if she couldn’t remember her last name or who killed her or any of the rest of it. She was less proud of the telekinesis, which struck Elektra as the opposite of how things should be.

“Or you,” Darcy told Elektra. “Don’t encourage her. She’s trouble enough as it is.”

“I encourage her the way she ought to be encouraged.” Watching Kate burst lightbulbs in a temper was a joy, and she would continue to perpetuate it for as long as possible. “Besides, I drive you and your wretched phobia where you need to go.”

“Cars are machines of devilry and death,” said Darcy, and went back to her notebook.

“Why would we need to talk to them?” Karen Page fretted with her skirt. “It’s not as though we can’t follow the ley line.”

“No,” Elektra said, and collected Sai. “But you never know, they might give us a better place to look than _asscrack of local woods._ ”

She cracked after she said it. Sai cracked back at her.

“We’ll keep it in mind,” Darcy said. “I would prefer looking into it without tarot cards, first.”

 _In mind_ wound up being _after Hugo Natchios died_ and _after Karen Page moved in_ and _after All Hallow’s Eve_ and _after, after, after. In mind_ wound up being seven months later, and Sai clung with heavy claws to her shoulder and snapped her wicked beak as Professor Frost went over Latin declensions on the board. Elektra wrote all her answers in Greek, and refused to attend detention.

.

.

.

Matt was blind, and the corpse road depended very much on sight, but the ghost of his true love was something he couldn’t avoid.

She didn’t speak, really. She circled him. There was a smell hanging in the air like honey, and a brush of cool, misty fingers on the inside of his wrist. She circled him three times, humming, and then said, “Good night, witchboy.” She said it in a twangy, Hell’s Kitchen way, the way his dad spoke and how he did, and it was a gentle little thing, the touch on the inside of his wrist, another circle over his pulse. He thought Emma must have heard him take a breath, thought Emma or Foggy must have noticed something. But Foggy was chatting with the ghost of a man named Phil Coulson, and Emma was deep in noting down the name of every ghost that passed along the line, and neither of them saw anything at all.

“What’s your name?” Emma said, and the ghost that smelled of honey said, “Darcy.”

(He stole the notebook out of Emma’s bag later, ran his fingers down all the names. _Darcy Lewis_ is one of the last, and he wanted to scratch it out of him with his devil fingers. Jack found him, and found the book, and took it from him, and when his father wrapped both arms around Matt and held onto him, Matt forgot that he had the Devil inside, and pretended to breathe until he could.)

(He stopped breathing again the next day when they all clattered into the gym, all those Raven Girls, and one of them hooked her hair behind her ears and left honey hanging in the air as she said, “I’m Darcy Lewis, I was hoping to talk to Jack Murdock about a reading.”

“Emma’s the one you want,” Matt said, his throat closing. “This way.”)

.

.

.

Cabeswater spoke to each of them in different tongues.

To Kate, who died on the edge, it whispered in Japanese. It was all maple for Kate, maple and pine, with long-fingered, red-faced man-things with long noses and white hair poking out from behind trees. Turtles walked on their hind legs. It was Japanese and it was not, because there were satyrs in it, too, flowers that hissed your darkest secrets, orchids that strangled and ponds so sleek and still that they could have been mirrors if they hadn’t been pitch black. They found Kate’s bones at the only clear one, a knife nestled between her ribs, and Kate did not flicker once as all the leaves around them caught flame.

To Karen, it was the lilt of Romanian, the trees—a different sort of pine, now, taller, broader—singing lullabies and sending dark flares of sparks through the air. The vines would carol when they passed, and roots would curl around her ankles to hold her there. _I will be your hands,_ she’d said, _I will be your eyes,_ and when Emma taught her the cards, her long white hair bound up at the top of her head, bare-legged (she’d forgotten pants that day, though whether it was intentional or not Karen never figured out) the secrets of the wood seemed to creep from beneath her fingernails in strands of spider’s silk.

To Elektra it was Greek, and Elektra spoke back to it that way, demanding, the way only the Greywaren could demand, shouting Cabeswater down, building it anew, carving trees and worlds and dreams out of smoke. The raven sat on her shoulder, another dream-thing, and she snarled at Cabeswater in the language of the ancients, and it snarled back at her in time, two wolves circling, waiting for blood.

To Matt it was the snatches of Irish he remembered from his grandparents, mixed with the Greek he’d never learned, and the strands of Russian Darcy would whisper to him sometimes when he sat in the back of Elektra’s car and let her speak to him, because Darcy panicked in cars, and Karen could only keep her calm for so long. She traced Cyrillic letters into his palm, and they etched themselves into the bark of Cabeswater’s trees, and when he let his hands rest on the marks it was with honey swirling in his head.

To Darcy, it never spoke. Or it did, but it only ever said one thing. _You live for the Raven Queen. You live for me. Find me._

_Find me._


End file.
